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Stand Up for Nature is run by Jamie Unwin, a wildlife cameraman, national geographic explorer and award-winning wildlife photographer. Jamie has filmed for the BBC, Netflix, Apple, Nat Geo and Channel 4. He shoots and directs the Stand Up for Nature films.
A talented Kenyan team do all the post production and when in Kenya lead the bicycle-powered cinema showings. |
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"I’ve always felt helpless in the face of all the depressing news regarding the plight of the planet's environment and its inhabitants. I was incredibly fortunate to travel to Malawi in 2015 as it opened my eyes to conservation and made me realise that it’s certainly not impossible to help our diminishing wildlife populations. Coupling my scientific background with wildlife filming has enabled me to target what I feel so most passionate about; wildlife crime and human wildlife conflict."
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Background to Stand Up for nature
Stand Up for Nature was originally founded by two university friends, Hannah Pollock and Jamie Unwin. In 2014, during our first year of university, we successfully completed a self-generated expedition to a never-before-studied forest in Madagascar. We were told that we were too young but we managed to prove ourselves to the Royal Geographic Society, who then supported the expedition. We realised that, with a bit of drive and motivation, a lot of things are possible.
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Later that year Jamie gained the support of Sony to help him to make a film in Malawi - this was when we discovered that a lot of people all across Africa had never seen a lot of their world-famous wildlife. We wanted to use films to inspire people in Malawi about wildlife but we needed a way of showing the film! Not being able to afford to buy a bicycle-powered cinema, Jamie designed and built our own. So during our 2015 university Christmas holidays we headed back to Malawi and led our first ever Bicycle-powered cinema project down the entire length of the country. We worked with 21 different partners and managed to show 14,000 people the film in just 6 weeks. Please see the short video to see what we got up to!
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Graduating from university in 2017 with degrees in Zoology, we headed straight to Kenya for our biggest bicycle-cinema project yet. Our dream had been building momentum over our last year at uni and we had managed to gain support from National Geographic, The Scientific Exploration Society and the Explorers Club. We wanted to take a risk and produce the first-ever extensive series of local language films about local unsung heroes and then show these to people living in human-wildlife conflict hotspots. We went on a 6-month-long adventure and found people doing incredible things; from a man who habituated himself into a troop of baboons, to a boy who hand-reared a baby buffalo! Showing these films throughout Kenya showed us how impactful these projects could be; we had people living around the Maasai Mara telling us they had never seen some of the wildlife in our films!
We both share an incredible passion for the natural world and Stand Up for Nature is our way of standing up for the causes we feel so strongly about. In 2020 Hannah left Stand Up for Nature to focus on her new job at the BBC, we wish her all the best in her future endeavours!
We both share an incredible passion for the natural world and Stand Up for Nature is our way of standing up for the causes we feel so strongly about. In 2020 Hannah left Stand Up for Nature to focus on her new job at the BBC, we wish her all the best in her future endeavours!